Reddit reviews The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide

Kagame is most likely not behind the murder of Habyarimana. Looking at the chain of events, the Hutu majority was being stirred up against the Tutsi minority for months prior to the assassination. There were also rumors of something big happening before the assassination. Less than an hour after Habyarimana's plane crashed, the military had roadblocks up and was searching opposition leader houses. Within hours, the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus had began, the culmination of months of propaganda against the "Tutsi cockroaches".

We don't know who fired the SAMs that hit Habyarimana's plane, but they were most likely fired from areas that the Rwandan army already controlled. It's widely believed that Hutu extremists who wanted to eliminate the Tutsis were responsible for taking out Habyarimana, a major obstacle to their goal. Further, his agreement to the Arusha Accords would end the Rwandan Civil War and create a power-sharing agreement with the Tutsis, something that many Hutus disagreed with. To be fair, Habyarimana didn't like the accords, particularly since they stripped many of his powers, but they were a means to end the civil war.

So why would Kagame, a Tutsi, assassinate Habyarimana? The Arusha Accords would give Tutsis power. The genocide decimated Kagame's tribe and anyone paying attention to the situation in Rwanda knew that it was a powder keg. The Tutsis were in a position to reclaim some lost political power and there was even a possibility that the Rwandan "Tutsi diaspora" across neighboring countries could eventually return home. For Kagame to throw away this huge win for the Tutsis on an outright gamble doesn't make sense.

Note regarding the use of the words "civil war": Some would argue that because the Tutsis who invaded Rwanda in 1990 were based in Uganda, largely members of the Ugandan army, and supported by the Ugandan president, that it was an invasion by Uganda and not a civil war. However, there was also a law passed that prevented non-Ugandans from owning land in Uganda. Because many of the Tutsis in the army were involuntarily exiled from Rwanda, but could not have a stable place in their adopted country, they felt tremendous pressure to return "home". I'm hard-pressed to say whether the term "civil war" is without merit, but it's a succinct way of describing the situation without getting into the complexities.

Sources: The Rwanda Crisis: History of Genocide and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (a brilliant and heart-breaking book).

That ELI5 is, of course by nature, too simplistic. The Germans didn't "install the Tutsi into power". Instead, Rwanda as it exists today is one of the few countries where the current borders pretty closely approximate with the borders of a complex hierarchical kingdom that existed before the country became a colony.

Colonial powers prefer using existing governing structures as it saves them the time and effort to set up an entire administrative system of their own, and in the case of Rwanda, this was easier than usual. They simply solidified the existing system, so in their eyes, at this point they weren't inducing volatility at all, but strengthening a stable system.

After WWI, the Belgians took over the administrative functions and they not only continued to rely on these governing structures, but, guided by the racist and eugenics movements of the time, came up with a racial explanation for the Tutsi rule: their superiority was demonstrated by their lighter skin, aquiline nose, tall stature, etc. as opposed to the broad-nosed, darker and shorter Hutus. According to this new racial mythology, Hutu were Bantus while the Tutsi were part-Caucasian.

So they didn't intend to induce volatility, but they certainly weren't well-intentioned when they decided how to rule. As to direct economic gain, Rwanda has few resources and covers a small and landlocked territory, but it was well-suited for cash crop production of mainly coffee and some tea.

This is another important cause of the volatility of the country in itself. The post-colonial one-party dictatorship under Hutu rule relied almost entirely on a mix of foreign aid and profits from the coffee trade, and purposely kept the country rural and the population uneducated in order to maximize the exploitability of its only profitable natural resource.

When coffee prices plummeted in the late 1980ies, this caused serious problems for the regime as both the international and domestic communities as well as the exiled Tutsi community in Uganda mounted a serious opposition to the dictatorship. They were eventually forced to agree to political reforms, but hard-liners who were unwilling to relinquish their power seized control after the assassination (probably by the RPF - Tutsi rebels from Uganda) of the President, were able to use the years of anti-Tutsi propaganda, trained submission through dictatorship, and fears about the rebels from Uganda to organize the genocide.


There still is a lot more to it, and it is also interesting, but worrying to see many parallels between the current post-genocide Tutsi government and the pre-genocide Hutu government. I mostly based the above on academic sources, but more accessible reading I could recommend about the country and the region would include Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and anything by Prunier and Mamdani. Jared Diamond's Collapse has a chapter on Rwanda which focuses on the economic dimension; it's a bit controversial, but based on some very interesting research.

I'd recommend these ones:

http://www.amazon.com/When-Victims-Become-Killers-Colonialism/dp/0691102805

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rwanda-Crisis-History-Genocide/dp/023110409X

Bit more academic, but still accessible and more reliable than Gourevitch, who doesn't have nearly the same knowledge of the country.